Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.

Mass Effect 2 has always surprised us by just how strenuous it is, even though UE3 is intended to be flexible to reach a wide range of systems. Furthermore it doesn’t seem to benefit nearly as much from the GTX 580 as other games, with the performance advantage over the GTX 480 shrinking to around 13%. The ultimate victor ends up being the AMD multi-GPU setups, and farther above that still is the GTX 470 SLI.